How Time Works

How Does Time Work?

Time ultimately comes from two pieces of information: 1: our earth's position of orbit around the sun 2: our earth's rotation in relation to the sun

1: The Earth's Position

This tells us what part of a year we are in; one full orbit is a year. We divided our year into twelve parts called months. Let's visualize the earth's orbit with its seasons. The balls that orbit are the Earth, and each ball has two halves which represent the north and south hemisphere:

If we look at October, for instance, the northern hemisphere is in fall, while the southern hemisphere is in spring.

12 months make one year, then we divide it into quarters. Each of those quarters we called seasons. In summary:1 year = 1 earth orbit around the sun1 year = 12 months3 months = 1 season

Seasons are only possible because of the earth's tilt. Which ever pole is tilted towards the sun, that side is in summer, the opposite pole is in winter. This means the south and north hemisphere have opposite seasons. It is summer in North America when it is winter in Australia.

There are around 365.242 days in a year, so we mark on a calendar:365 : the basis for every year.242 : since this is close to a quarter, every 4 years we add a day, this is called a leap year. But since it isn't a full quarter (0.25), we deny a leap year every 400 years.

2: The Earth's Rotation

Sunlight passes over us on our particular longitude (east/west point) on the planet as it rotates creating the full day and night cycle. It is noon in China while it is midnight in the US. Let's see this:

A day is a complete rotation of the earth. We take a day and cut it up into two halves. Each of those halves we divide into 12 periods of time called hours. Two sets of 12 hours makes 24 hours in a day. In summary:1 day = 1 complete earth rotation1 day = 2 parts1 part = 12 hours2 parts = 24 hours

Then we take those hours and divide them into 60 periods of time called minutes. We repeat this again, taking 1 minute and dividing it up into 60 periods of time called seconds:1 hour = 60 minutes1 minute = 60 seconds